From her home tucked under the steep escarpment at Lake George's western edge, Elizabeth Dalman has watched the lake levels rise and fall for more than 30 years.
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But she says this year has seen the most significant rise in some 20 years, fed by the wettest winter and spring in recent memory.
While the lake isn't yet lapping, as it once did, along the verge of Lake Road which winds its way along the western shore, with more rainfall forecast in the days ahead, it may well happen again.
Lake George, or Weereewa as it it is known to the local Indigenous community, is a curious and ephemeral phenomenon - purely a product of evaporation and rainfall - with a lengthy social attachment to the national capital.
Formed some five million years ago when the escarpment rose up to encapsulate it, the lake is about 30 kilometres long and 11 kilometres wide, and seven metres deep at its lowest point. In the 1950s, it was the original site of the Canberra Yacht Club.
Ms Dalman, who owns and runs the Mirramu Creative Arts Centre which overlooks the lake, said she can remember swimming when she first arrived there in 1990 but the lake level had gradually receded ever since and only now is slowly climbing back to its once-impressive proportions.
The prolonged drought which preceded the Black Summer bushfires turned the lake all but dry, with only some pools left along its deeper eastern edge. It was so dry, in fact, that Mirramu could confidently schedule regular dance performances on the lake bed, with the patrons circled in fold-up chairs.
Nearby Bungendore, which has grown exponentially in size in the past few decades, draws its town water from bores driven deep into aquifers beneath the Lake George basin. It was only two years ago that water restrictions were imposed in the town ahead of possible water shortages. That issue now appears to be well in the past.
"The level of the lake has always come and gone over the years but to my recollection, the April-May rains just after the Black Summer bushfires two years ago seemed to be the turning point," Ms Dalman said.
"Gradually, since then we've seen it [the lake] fill more than fall."
A sure sign of the turn for the better in the health of the waterway has been the return of birdlife to the lake's periphery, particularly the spectacular black swans.
During heavy rain, water pours off the escarpment in spectacular falls, creating flash floods which cut off the residents' access to Bungendore Road. Then when the weather clears, huge flocks of birds descend on the shoreline.
Ms Dalman and a group of supporters attempted some years ago to seek a heritage listing for the lake, but their efforts were unsuccessful.
"Our view is that the lake deserves protection; it is a unique and beautiful natural asset," she said.
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Further along the road at the Spring Wattle Quaker's retreat, centre director Felicity Rose said the recent rainfall has brought on such prolific growth that the dreaded Paterson's curse had grown shoulder high in places, and it took the rapid deployment of a local farmer's mob of sheep to bring it under control.
"It's hard to believe that just a few years ago the lake bed was exposed and it was just dry, cracked earth," she said.
"Of course, it's quite shallow on our western edge so you can walk out a fair way in gumboots. But looking at it from above - as many people do, from the lookout on the Federal Highway - it is quite a visually impressive sheet of water now.
"It has always been a very interesting place to live, with many different moods, but always serene and very peaceful."
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